parenthesis
by s2lou
Summary: The train runs into the dark like a great, wild-barking dog. Aoko sees it coming, the night. Aoko-centric, side KA. Happy Birthday, DireSphinx!


**A/N:** Happy birthday, **DireSphinx!** This was written in a day and a half and most of it in class, so it's probably horrible, and it _is_ extremely muddled; but. Hope you enjoy; you deserve it all and more. Lots of love, m'dear. *hands Cake*

…

**parenthesis**

…

They sell little metallic animals at a store in the station. They are light grey and smooth and chubby, and Aoko almost falls in love with the long plastered ears of a small, crouching rabbit; when she buys it, it is round and soft, a little cool, cradled in her palm and in her pocket. Her fingers follow lines (the little head, the nose, an eye) when she slinks up into her compartment, unwraps her scarf from around her neck.

The lights are blurry from inside the station, softened and dampened like fraying fabric, and the silhouettes that move between are slow, wrapped in overcoats and felt hats; the cold, and her own breath, fog up the windowpane, dissolving the colours into a diluted canvas, occasionally broken black&white by the shout of the newspaper boy.

The slippery slide and curve of an ear; the round inside of the belly; the jut of a hind leg and paw. The metal warms to her touch, makes a little pool of smooth heat against her side.

"Ex_cuse_ me," bustles a woman in, whoomping on the seat over the way. There's a man of thirty or so with an academic manner that follows, and then a father with his child and baby. Aoko crosses her grey-linen ankles together, tucks them on the seat and just underneath the rim of her coat, and closes her eyes to her forehead against the chilled glass. She feels more than she hears the train set itself into motion, with the great rock-and-roll of its wheels, and the great puffs of its breath.

..

Two months after graduating home was no longer home but a smallish shabby brown flat downtown, with cracks in the ceiling and rundown cupboards, water that ran cold oftener than hot and little chips of soap crusted between the parquet slats. Aoko loved it, loved calling home the space between the chipped teacups on the kitchen shelf, home the crick of the key in the hole, home the faded leather armchair tucked between the table and the minuscule, shuddering telly. She could hear the rain patter every night on the roof like mice, and when she shoved the window down in the morning could feel it pinpointing her face, slick and cold. In the evenings, she would run down to the all-night store and buy noodles and soup, and lemonade which she drank in empty beer cans she snagged when lunching with her father.

It was formidable to be twenty, just on the cusp of life, balancing, _there_; to soak in baths that cooled on Sunday afternoons, and wrap up in fluffy white bathrobes, and sip hot milk; to delight in sprawls and denim, and listen to her mother's old vinyls, in loops, until all the beautiful, scratchy sound was drained, drenched out of her; to wake late, as always, and fall out of bed while struggling with her jeans, bumping against all the furniture along the way. Maybe, she thought, if she stayed here long enough, if she hung on to these rickety-rockety things long enough, then maybe everything good would fall into place, make sense, _here_.

Shh, said the cushions, the curtains, and the chairs, when the night had come and Aoko slept. Shh, said the windows and the books, when she nodded off on college homework, nose smudged with ink. Shh, said the clocks, when she dozed after the buzz of warmmilk, all curled up like a cat in the leather armchair.

Shh.

..

The train runs into the dark like a great, wild-barking dog. Aoko sees it coming, the night, black and curtain-like across the clear-cut sky, swallowing them into shadow; the compartment lamps, blinking on, look like sleepy animals, like birds fluffing and fussing their feathers. The woman up front daintily eats a ham-and-butter sandwich from aluminium crinkle. From time to time, she sips from a metallic cup a brownish-white liquid, with nary a slosh.

On the side banquette, the baby dozes and its elder brother sulks, bored right of his wits; Aoko watches, fascinated, his father create shape and form out of wrinkled orange origami, sidle flowers and dogs on the velvet seat, work magic into his young son's eye. The academic man of thirty-or-so glares steadily all along, and Aoko thinks they are metaphors, them-this, in the warm, golden compartment, inside the chilled glass: she builds word-cathedrals around them before pummelling them into proverbial tangents, with uncharacteristic easiness; and then she sleeps, with her fingertips smudges with words and wonders.

..

"'llo. Hi," said the phone. "Aoko?"

"Hmmm."

"You well, there?"

"_Kaito._" Laughing: knocked the plone over close with a bath-pinked toe, nudged it—the receiver—in the tight little warm crook between neck and jaw. "I don't."

"Don't mind," he translated, muffledly. "Yeah, I know."

"You're being stupid."

"So're you," said the grin, in his throat. Aoko blinked, rapidly.

"Hmm."

"Stop."

"No."

"Come?"

"… would you?"

Silence in the crackling, whispery space between phone and voice, all thin air-wires between them, stretching on miles and miles and miles and miles _and_. "I may," said Kaito, and Aoko, curled in on her herself on the windowseat, with the folds of her long, white bathrobe pooling, tumbling, around her, heard: _miss you_.

..

At nine, in a 15-minute-stop mid-station, she buys a hotdog, slick and slippery with the sweet Swedish mustard. She licks it off her fingers, tongue poking out to taste the soot-heavy air, and takes a bite off: soft bread and sausage and a slight tingle, heady on the tongue, and warm. The paper is greasy and thick, leaving sticky newsprint on the fingertips, and she suckles on them, laps at the corners of her mouth like a fussy puppy, and laughs so quietly she nearly chokes on her drink.

Just before the train pulls out again she buys coffee, in a paper cup with the top enclosed, to be drunk later—hot and cocoa-flavoured—when the compartment rocks _chun chun chun ka chun ka_ on through the night.

..

It was a week ago, and in the kitchen. Aoko blinked, in the middle of toasting—caught, absently, the piece that sprang, and yet more absently coated four of her fingers with orange marmalade. Morning was bursting in, in a crisp joyous flood of sunlight across the window and table and floor, blurring lines and smoothing angles, and breakfast wasn't over and she was hardly dressed and she wanted to take a shower and she was running late and she was supposed to speak to the landlord before leaving and and and and and and and and and and maybe that was why she had started thinking of trains, earlier on.

The radio crackled and sniggered at her until she planted a fork in it and carried it over to a high stool.

(There was a postcard propped on the windowsill, against the milk jug and the honey, squeezed in-between, full of promises: a red umbrella on the one side, unfurled and whirling in a blur, and, on the other, curling loops of penmanship, in the tight space between each line, each beginning l-o-v-e-y-o-u.)

Aoko rested her cheek against the cool edge of a high cupboard, and tried very silently and quietly to breathe.

..

The dainty woman wraps her coat around her like an immense leaf, and that's how Aoko knows—the rustling—that the station looms close. It engulfs them into brightness, wakes the baby and propels the academic man's books onto the floor—swallows them up like a great, golden dragon with dark-smoked eyes. Aoko closes her hand around the metallic round rabbit until her pocket, feels its cool tingle on her fingers, and smiles, because this is better than milk and honey, better than sweet mustard and all the coffee in the world: and maybe they'll sit with denim-clad legs, entangled, too, and listen to these old LPs, and maybe it'll, all of it, make sense, then.

_Hello_, she thinks, fondly, to the dark silhouette on the platform, with the wild hair and the huge brown jacket. _I've missed you terribly._

…

**End Notes: **I'm working on Nekomata!Kaito. I am, I am. I'm also thinking of doing another of these one-drabble-a-day series, but that may require some planning and time. (Both of which I'm rather short of right now.)


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